Integral Design and Manufacturing Methodology of a Reduced-Scale Servo Press

Abstract

In a context where industrial production boosts both the society and the economy of a country, improvements in industrial processes are key factors for efficient and reliable development of goods and products. New industrial processes and machines must be evaluated before deployment at large production scales. This article proposes a new optimized design and manufacturing methodology to develop scaled test benches under predefined design requirements and constraints. The main contribution of this article is the integral scaling methodology based on an optimized dimensional analysis and a similitude metric that eases the design of a test bench. Thus, the search for the optimal physical magnitudes of the test bench is accelerated, and the inability to design nonproportional components is solved avoiding distortion. The first step of the methodology is definition of scaling laws through the Buckingham's <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\pi$</tex-math></inline-formula> theorem. The second step is to employ a constrained optimization to determine the physical magnitudes of the test bench, based on the scaling laws defined earlier. The third step is to calculate the parameter activities and to set the design tolerances of the scaled components, so that the components are designed more freely while dealing with nonproportional ratios obtained due to arbitrary constraints. The methodology was used to construct a test bench of a servo press that retains the kinematics and dynamics of an industrial servo press. Experimental assessment of the dynamic and kinematic similitudes showed a less than 5% deviation from the industrial servo press's force/angular position ratio.